Working Assets, the long distance phone company that donates to progressive causes, is championing a truly noxious idea, that the U.S. get out of Iraq and instead invade Sudan. Their slogan is ‘Out of Iraq into Darfur.’ No doubt, Working Assets would want this to be a ‘humanitarian mission’ but does anyone believe that’s what the neocons would do?

To promote a new imperialist intervention as a cure for the previous intervention is clueless as well as being complicit in the Bush agenda, an odd position indeed for a supposedly progressive organization.

Counterpunch has more, including how Zionists and the neocons are using Darfur as a way to deflect attention from Palestine - and maybe planning ‘regime change’ too.

Just saying no to imperial intervention in Sudan

We’re talking about a rally [on May 2 in D.C.] urging a U.S./NATO intervention in Africa’s largest country, legitimated by the UN strong-armed by a thuggish neocon-led administration in Washington. We’re talking potentially about regime change in Africa’s second-largest oil producer, in the context of planned U.S. strikes against Syria and Iran. Should anyone in the antiwar movement with a minimal knowledge or recent history be comfortable with that, or suppose that it could be fully benign?

What IS Working Assets thinking? Why would ‘progressives’ favor more military intervention by the U.S. in yet another country?

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Neil Volz, former chief of staff to U.S. Representative Bob Ney, pleaded guilty in the corruption scandal surrounding lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

Meanwhile, little elves in D.C. are making sure all that talk of lobbyist reform remains just that.

A sham of a lobbyist reform bill

They won’t reform themselves. They either must be forced to do so or removed from power. It’s not a question of a few corrupt Congressmembers, the system itself is corrupt. That’s what needs to be changed.

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Asian Americans have large stake in immigrant rights, too

On May 1, 1975, the day after Saigon fell, my family and I had recently left Vietnam for the United States.

So the immigrant rights rallies on May 1 had special meaning for me.

I always hear how impressed people are with Vietnamese refugees, who came here with nothing and excelled beyond anyone’s expectations. But what they leave out is that early Vietnamese families came during a time that U.S. refugee policy supported them.

We had case managers, food stamps and English tutors. My family was allowed to come here, and we were then able to support each other. That meant my grandmother could baby-sit, allowing both my parents to work even without being able to afford childcare.

Though we tried to make it on our own as quickly as possible, knowing that we had a safety net gave us the courage to excel.

One million Asians living in the United States are undocumented. About 18 percent of Korean Americans are undocumented. There are undocumented immigrants in the Chinese community, in the South Asian community, in all of our communities.

That’s why tens of thousands of us marched for our rights along with our immigrant friends and neighbors.

Read the whole article

Los Angeles has a large Korean population. They and other Asian communities have given major support to the immigrant rights marches. Watching and listening to a Korean drum contingent enter an immigration rally site, drums pounding, chanting “si se puede” is inspiring and a true demonstration of what solidarity is.

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You can configure WordPress and Movable Type blogs to have posts appear at a time of your choosing in the future - handy if you want posts to appear when you won’t be near a computer.

WordPress:

It’s not particularly well-documented and took me a few tries to figure it out. Here’s how:

In Write Post -

• (create the post)
• In ‘Post TimeStamp’, click ‘Edit Timestamp.’ Then change the date/time to when you want it to appear.
• Click ‘Publish.’

Note: This works on WordPress.org blogs but doesn’t seems to work on WordPress.com blogs. Maybe it’s a transient thing there, as they’ve been having growth pains. It’s a bug and they’re working on it.

Movable Type

Change post status to ‘Scheduled.’
Change ‘Authored on’ to when you want it to appear.

Note: For this to work, you need to set up a Chron Job on the server first, here’s the docs. Doing so isn’t as fearsome as it might appear at first to a newbie.

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